U.S. Sen. Bill Nelson, D-Fla., arrives at his reelection party at a hotel, Tuesday, Nov. 6, 2012, in Orlando, Fla. Nelson defeated Republican Rep. Connie Mack in his bid for a third term. (AP Photo/John Raoux)

U.S. Sen. Bill Nelson, D-Fla., arrives at his reelection party at a hotel, Tuesday, Nov. 6, 2012, in Orlando, Fla. Nelson defeated Republican Rep. Connie Mack in his bid for a third term. (AP Photo/John Raoux)

Photo: John Raoux, STF

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Congressman John Culberson

Congressman John Culberson

Photo: www.AlexandersPortraits.com

NASA's future up in air during spending debate

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WASHINGTON - One of the nation's strongest advocates for manned space exploration - Sen. Bill Nelson, a former astronaut - wistfully recalls making a personal appeal to Texas Sen. Ted Cruz and Rep. Lamar Smith, R-San Antonio, to support more funding for NASA.

But for Nelson, a Democrat from Florida, the subsequent party line votes by the two Texans and other GOP lawmakers on key committees reflect deepening partisan disagreements over the destination, timetable and budget for future manned space missions as well as the leadership structure and congressional support for NASA.

"What is sad to me is that NASA has always been above politics," says Nelson, who flew aboard Space Shuttle Columbia for six days as a payload specialist in 1986. "Now it's gotten to be a partisan issue, and that is a sad day for the country."

From Smith's perspective, it is the duty of resolute Republicans in the GOP-controlled House to reduce red-ink spending by cutting money for federal agencies, including NASA.

The nation's manned space program stands at a crossroads, with uncertainty affecting Houston's Johnson Space Center, the heart of the American space enterprise. JSC accounts for 3,200 NASA jobs and 11,000 NASA contractor employees, which pumps nearly $4.5 billion a year into the local economy in payrolls and contracts.

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Culberson's recommendations

Rep. John Culberson, the Houston congressman in line to chair the House Appropriations Committee panel with jurisdiction over NASA in 2015, hopes to strengthen NASA's long-term prospects by making the agency less vulnerable to partisan jockeying with these steps:

1 Authorize NASA to use multi-year acquisition contracts like those used by the Navy to build submarines and aircraft carriers.

1 Allow NASA to submit its annual budget request directly to Congress rather than going through the White House Office of Management and Budget where Culberson claims the annual request gets shredded.

1 Establish a fixed 10-year term for the NASA administrator akin to the multi-presidential term of the FBI director.

"Even though we're in a rough patch right now, we're going to get through this, and NASA is going to be fine," says the seven-term lawmaker. "You can take it to the bank that NASA will continue to benefit from whole-hearted support by Congress."

The threatened upheaval comes as commercial firms begin ferrying cargo to the orbiting $100 billion International Space Station before eventually delivering U.S. astronauts.

Beyond such routine commercial missions, NASA has a fight on its hands on Capitol Hill over the destination for the first manned mission beyond low-earth orbit since Eugene Cernan left the last footprints on the moon in 1972, 41 years ago.

Without a U.S.-Soviet space race to galvanize political and budget support, NASA engineers are exploring an estimated $2.6 billion scheme to snare a speeding asteroid, steer it into orbit around the moon and land astronauts on its surface by 2021. The mission would test-drive deep space capabilities as a steppingstone for astronauts to orbit Mars by 2035.

Senior NASA engineers have been traveling the country to brainstorm with civilian counterparts, including a conference at Houston's Lunar and Planetary Institute.

Planetary defense

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Experts think the asteroid mission also would help develop technology capable of planetary defense against meteorites such as the 20-foot diameter, 10,000-ton Chelyabinsk meteor that exploded over Siberia last February with 30 times the explosive force of the Hiroshima atomic bomb.

William Gerstenmaier, associate administrator for NASA's human exploration and operations directorate, has even appealed to the nation's collective imagination.

"Turn off your logical side and turn on your touchy-feely side, the one you almost never use," Gerstenmaier counseled participants at a recent aeronautics and astronautics conference in San Diego. "Then jump up and down and do some break-dancing. We're going to grab a space rock, and we're going to move it!"

Yet the federal National Research Council that draws upon outside expertise from the national academies of science and engineering has questioned the asteroid mission, citing the mismatch between NASA's competing programs and the money available.

"We've seen limited evidence that this (asteroid mission) has been widely accepted as a compelling destination by NASA's own workforce, by the nation as a whole or by the international community," says panel chairman Albert Carnesale, chancellor emeritus and professor at the University of California at Los Angeles.

Smith, who chairs the House Committee on Science, Space and Technology, has already steered legislation through his committee on a party-line vote of 22 to 17 to bar NASA from using the $100 million the agency requested for the asteroid mission.

Smith also insists that NASA forgo the $17.7 billion annual budget sought by the White House in favor of a $16.9 billion budget for the fiscal year. The GOP-led House Appropriations Committee wants to provide even less, setting aside only $16.1 billion for NASA.

But the Democratic-led Senate - and former astronaut Nelson - are going in the other direction. The Senate Commerce, Science and Transportation Committee, where Nelson chairs the space panel, has authorized NASA to spend $18.1 billion during fiscal 2014 that began Oct. 1.

Eventual action on the measures by the entire House and Senate will set the stage for a House-Senate conference committee to resolve differences.

Partisan political warfare was on full display during the recent government shutdown. Rep. Steve Stockman, a Republican from Friendswood, whose district includes Houston's space facility, said that calls from JSC employees were running 9-to-1 in favor of his stance of supporting the shutdown as a way to boost political pressure to defund the Affordable Care Act known as Obamacare.

"With a wife who is a JSC employee I know better than most how important full NASA funding is and how many hits JSC employees have taken under Obama," Stockman said.

The lawmaker's claim prompted JSC employees and supporters to gather in Stockman's district office to press their point that the furloughed workers preferred that the government reopen.

Another partisan thrust came from Rep. Donna Edwards, D-Md., a former employee of NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center outside Washington, D.C., who wants Congress to create a commission to close NASA facilities in congressional districts where Republican lawmakers had voted steep reductions in the NASA earth sciences budget supervised at Goddard.

Then came a volley from Sen. David Vitter, R-La., who blocked Senate confirmation of NASA chief financial officer Elizabeth Robinson to become second-in-command at the Energy Department. Vitter accused NASA of "stalling a job-creating project" for up to 600 people at the agency's Michoud Assembly Facility in New Orleans.

Nelson pushes agency

The partisan climate worries Nelson who had been able to forge a bipartisan compromise with then-Sen. Kay Bailey Hutchison, R-Texas, in 2010 that benefited manned space operations in both Florida and Texas.

Their deal accepted Obama's cancellation of the back-to-the-moon Constellation program, ended the shuttle program and boosted NASA backing for the commercial space industry at the same time that it bolstered deep space missions with a multipurpose crew capsule and heavy-lift rocket.

Civic leaders in Houston remain optimistic that NASA, Congress and the White House will reach an agreement on the next destination for manned space exploration - an asteroid or the moon.

"We think at the end of the day cooler heads will prevail, and the right destination will be selected," says Bob Mitchell, president of the Bay Area Houston Economic Partnership. "But that won't happen without compromise - something that's been in short supply in Washington."